Rooms Extract 5: SETS AND SETTINGS II

CRUMPLED GHOST

Exhausted by the back of things, that there is a back to composure — still, falseness is enticing.

The everyday is compelling, sure. But every day (my bedroom, the library, the shop) is contracted — I am obliged not to walk into your house, to test (by lying there) the space beneath your bed, the rough frost in your freezer, or your browser tab for habits. Like I said, resisting is exhausting.

Layers of choices make the face of construction, in sight and hidden. The bare facts are probably enough, but then — a par-demolition on your street exposes internal walls. A riot of voices are thrust in the open, exposing private choices: eggshell or ecru, honey?

I want to be granted a permit for agency. I want to get about, slewing excess from knowing until its trueface is found, until the thing, the believed in, becomes a crumpled ghost in space.

YOU DISAPPOINT ME

In a pub, irrationally furnished (it’s more of a bar with its fraction of sleaze), I observe each table in turn — looking just long enough to keep a fresh mental picture without unsettling the sitters.

I make repeat trips (eyes alone) to a table in the centre. Its figure mirrors me — absent-mindedly drinking a glass of something, one hand procrastinating in hair and the other attempting to study. Like me, dressed warmly and unattractively, so as not to attract, and sitting at the only single-person table, quite cruelly placed (you’ll remember I said), right in the room’s centre. Quite exposed — I wouldn’t have chosen it, although the figure’s thoughts do remain private, reading and writing and such.

In another mind, a strange arrangement guided by a table makes a group of a semi-circle; separate people bunched around twenty or so camera monitors (a would-be security measure) displaying angles of the room’s tables. There’s nothing to secure here, or not to that extent, so its point is perhaps just entertainment. It shows, too, a high angle of another room, where a band is setting up.

Little pieces of over-heard conversation turn out to be disappointing (and so is the band).

I watch, as a room fills, as people filter in. As the pub fills itself. 9pm in a cheap place in London, Friday. Enough.

Never a diary. My thoughts are backed up by Joan. I would much rather be in her situations, but here, people are flirting with themselves and with

each other, unimaginatively. (But who is the one performing ‘unimaginatively’? Dear writer, you say, you disappoint me.) A heavily curled French accent dominates, and when someone smiles at me, I lose perspective with its implication, and lose the game.

To avoid distraction, I begin another. Stripping down the room piece by piece, I eliminate furnishings to find the biting point at which space this becomes pub (or is it bar), accepted and comprehendible. Somewhere between the tie-dye throws and a ‘vintage’ cash register, the room lurches: a living room, a low-budget gallery, a space for waiting — and so I wait and am still waiting. Sound imparts its seconds, but the room is not moving, is not moved in general.

LESSON PLAN

Begin by collecting cast-off pieces of furniture. Tip: plan around your council’s bulky goods collection day.

In an open space, set up the furniture pieces into archetypal arrangements — a pub, an office, a spa, a gallery, a shopping centre. (Ignore for now more complex combinations, like the café / bathroom fitment shop round the corner from your flat.)

Keep setups minimal — just enough for the room to be readable.

Once readability has been achieved, it is time to locate the edge of belief.

Remove each of the room’s objects in turn, experimenting with different arrangements of removal in order to discover the room’s biting point. Once discovered, everything must be directed to function at this point.

Attempt a distillation of the room in one object — its crux. Rather than finding yourself in a museum of clichés, try to find that root objects are surprising.

You are now ready to begin the second phase.

Find a teaching job where you can get once-a-week access to a group of students and a studio stocked with furniture. Write your term’s teaching plan around your own private task (that of locating a room’s biting point).

Set up several tables and chairs, imprecisely (such as a bar from plinths and some dusty cups and cutlery) and lean upon the imaginative capacity of your cohort. Again, work minimally.

As the students arrive, direct them to act accordingly. Let us here proceed with the scenario of a bar. If they are unfamiliar (they may not be drinkers) allow them to recall what they have seen in films, and instruct them to inhabit these perceived behaviours.

Dole out specific roles such as bar staff, girl alone studying, group of friends around screens. You will find that for some, this comes with a great deal of awkwardness — use it.

Give a specific and complicated idea of what you need from them — the fumbling flirtations will come naturally so leave that out, but you must have them understand the nuance of bar, and of pub, and of every other room in the world so that they believe in this space, so that, if you were to take out every object in the room, their belief would sustain the fact that, this is a bar, that same, semi-sleazy bar you once visited with the eurohippy throws and ‘vintage’ cash register. No bar is free from affect, no pub either. Each is decorated to a point, to point at something that is to be felt, believed in, but never quite said.

Give a speech addressing the above, passionately.

Select two as staff, and have the others intermittently approach the bar for drinks, or to visit the toilets, or gambling machines. Have some students remain in another room, as a sound-checking band. They need not enact this, but make sure the ‘live’ cohort know that they are there, pretending to do this. It will complexify their acting, their distraction.

Experiment by giving them lines composed of previously recorded pub/bar conversation. This can be fractured, unflowing, and is in fact all the better for it, in order to null unimaginative answers.

Now script the objects rather than the cohort, instruct the objects to perform just correctly enough, but not overdoing it. Remind them of the biting point.

Using a projector and camera, shows the students and objects a live film of themselves in the room.

(This is a drawing class, so at some point allow what’s in the room to draw.)